Big Books and Elvish

I love reference books. As a kid I spent hours and hours reading the dictionary, encyclopedias, or a thesaurus. (This was before the internet; I admit feeling nostalgia for big, heavy books.) I jumped around wherever my curiosity led me, following threads. The farther out I got, the more exciting it became, until I’d look up from the forest path in the dark and wonder how I got there.

Tolkien’s Elvish is the coolest thing ever. I would root through those books with the solemn intention of figuring all that out because, well, it was just the coolest thing ever. But it was a useful endeavor. When I started writing fantasy, my interior world came alive with all kinds of interesting things. I began writing down terms, pronunciations, sayings in different languages, places, landmarks, history and whatnot until I’d created a glossary. Originally, I wrote a separate one for each book in the Ealiron Chronicles, containing basic stuff and then all the creatures, artifacts, plants or places relevant to that particular story.

Then I had the idea of consolidating it all and putting it online, where I can drop in illustrations and links to neat things like maps, ensigns, related blog posts, etc. (Nosalgia aside, the internet is a beautiful thing.) And here it is: